Probability, Not Racial Profiling

By

Gene Epstein

September 6, 2014

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Reviewed by Gene Epstein

In this courageous and clearheaded polemic, Jason Riley recalls the racial profiling he suffered as a young black man attending college. Living off campus, he was stopped so often by police while driving to his classes in the morning, that he "started taking a different route to campus, even though it added 10 to 15 minutes to the trip."

Moving to New York after college, Riley kept encountering indignities, like being avoided by cab drivers or being asked to prepay for a meal after ordering in a restaurant. But while he recalls these experiences as frustrating—"I was getting hassled for the past behavior of other blacks"—he recounts them without anger.

Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley Encounter Books 184 pages, $23.99

Riley also recalls that he himself practiced racial profiling as an undergraduate working the night shift at a gas station with a mini-mart. Since "the people I caught stealing were almost always black," he writes, "when people who looked like me entered the store my antenna went up." He points out that, given "the reality of high black crime rates," most ordinary people, black or white, practice racial profiling because they are "acting on probability." He admits to crossing to the other side of the street at night when young black men approach, not because he is "judging them as individuals," but because he does not want to "take the risk."

As part of the author's plea that liberals "stop helping us," he argues that it is no help for liberals to blame racial profiling on racism, or to deny that society must be tough on crime. Since "90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks," liberals' general indifference to effective crime prevention comes down to caring "more about black criminals than their black victims."

A member of the editorial board at The Wall Street Journal (published by Dow Jones, which also publishes Barron's), Riley would surely call himself a conservative. But he pays homage to liberalism's achievements on behalf of blacks. "The civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century," he declares, "were liberalism at its best." He hails the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and includes in his honor roll "Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders, the NAACP, and others who helped to destroy significant barriers to black progress and make America more just."

But Riley believes that liberalism has long since become a part of the problem rather than part of the solution—and especially the liberalism of today's black leaders. "The civil rights movement of King has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt," he observes. By contrast, "King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of his day. King's successors…nevertheless insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone somewhere in white America is still using the n-word."

Liberals portray young black students as victims of school systems run according to "European American" values, a judgment that exempts the students from responsibility for poor performance. One reason this view is dubious, the author points out, is that black students from African countries generally perform better in school than their American counterparts, even though English is not their first language.

Another reason: Black American students show much-improved performance in charter schools—public schools run by independent organizations according to the same European-American values. The success of charter schools, he notes, is "one reason why they are so popular with black people." These are black people—as distinct from black civil rights leaders—who refuse to succumb to liberalism's destructive delusions about the proper schooling of their children.

Please Stop Helping Us is written in a clear but understated style that gains power from understatement. Not once, for example, does the author use emphatic words like "hypocrite" or "hypocrisy." But he does expose liberal hypocrisy in some of its blatant forms.

Speaking of the achievements of the school-choice movement via charter schools and vouchers, he points out that, while liberals "urge poor people to sit tight until…bad schools are fixed, they themselves typically show no such patience." Among liberal champions of public schools who nonetheless rejected these schools for their own children, he includes in the hypocrisy hall of shame Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Ted Kennedy.

The author quotes the bracing tough-talk of entertainer Bill Cosby, which he much prefers to the liberal rhetoric of President Obama. "We, as black folks, have to do a better job," Cosby declared in a speech for which he was vilified by the black intelligentsia. "No longer is a person embarrassed because [she is] pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father."

Or as Riley puts it, "Having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home."

Union Blues

Labor's slipping grip

Reviewed by Morgan Reynolds

According to Jake Rosenfeld, organized labor's benign effects have all but disappeared due to a precipitous decline in membership, strike activity, militancy, and political clout. If only unions could regain their past power, argues the University of Washington associate professor of sociology, they would once again be "the core equalizing institution [author's italics]," and "a counterbalance to corporate interests at the bargaining table." Unions would also regain their role as "a powerful normative voice for the welfare of non-elites" and be "vital in supporting the economic and civic advancement of historically disadvantaged populations."

The author largely dismisses the sordid history of unions' racist and sexist practices. Based on bitter knowledge and experience, black leader Booker T. Washington opposed unions all his life, and W. E.B. Du Bois called unions the greatest enemy of the working class. Unions excluded blacks from membership in the 1930s and 1940s. And the well-known "union label" was originally started in the 1880s to discriminate against another historically disadvantaged population, the Chinese, in order to signal that a product was made by non-Chinese hands.

What Unions No Longer Do

by Jake Rosenfeld Harvard University Press 288 pages, $39.95

It may require an economist rather than a sociologist to recognize that union wage rates, union-backed requirements for a license to practice various occupations, and union-backed labor regulations like the minimum-wage law and the Davis-Bacon Act continue to reduce opportunities for the disadvantaged. Yet, according to the author, unions are "the most prominent voice for economic justice in the U.S." Their greatly diminished clout means that average Americans "now toil in a largely unorganized economy in which their employers have amassed exceptional power to define nearly everything about their working lives."

Nearly everything? Such statements sound like social paranoia. In the real world, the U.S. labor market is highly competitive, with at least three million employers competing for labor. An employer with "exceptional power" cannot depress labor prices below the value of workers' productivity for long because other firms are attracted by the cheaper labor. The new firms hire these workers and thereby put upward pressure on the prices paid to labor until further profit from the initial exploitation of isolated labor disappears. Also, if employer clout depresses wage rates in one location, labor supply will decrease as workers leave, again putting corrective, upward pressure on wage rates.

As with most pro-union books, the consumer never appears on stage in Rosenfeld's morality play, and yet every worker is a consumer. Union wage exactions, work rules, threats, and strikes harm all consumers, who are mostly workers. In response, the sovereign consumer gives the orders. This real boss is heartless and cares nothing about past merit, vested interests, unions, and the rest. She just wants to buy what is better and cheaper for her and her family. Managements are at the mercy of a tough boss, and the best friend of low- and middle-income shopper-workers is Wal-Mart, ironically the bête noire of organized labor.

Economists consistently find that unionized firms earn lower returns than nonunion firms in comparable industries. Over the long run, investment goes elsewhere. Britain, birthplace of the factory system and once the industrial workshop of the world, was ruined by unions and turned into an industrial museum. In this country, the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers helped turn the industrial Midwest into the Rust Belt.

Can unionism arrest its decline? Rosenfeld doubts it, and I agree. He looks at the decline in labor union membership from five million to 3.5 million during the 1920s, followed by a dramatic turnaround after 1933 and the glory years during the middle decades of the 20th century. Yet, this was caused by federal intervention during the "national emergencies" of two world wars and the Great Depression. Pro-union rules remained after WW II, but peak private-sector membership of one in three workers in 1953 has plunged to one in 15 today.

Contrary to What Unions No Longer Do, workers and consumers have reason to be grateful for what unions no longer do—and can only hope they will do it even less than currently.

MORGAN REYNOLDS is a former chief economist at the Labor Department, and author of Power and Privilege: Labor Unionsin America. He contributed the essay "Labor Unions" to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Dangerous Aid

Why good intentions fail

Reviewed by Michael Strong

In this concise and readable work, George Mason University economics associate professor Chris Coyne has written a nearly definitive statement on an important theme: why aid from rich countries to poor countries generally fails to alleviate poverty.

Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails

by Chris Coyne Stanford University Press 272 pages, $25.95

While Coyne amply documents the ineffectiveness of most aid, his key point is that aid often does harm. The channeling of significant resources through the political system, with all of its corruption, actually undermines the channeling of resources through the market system, which would lead to broad-based prosperity if allowed to function properly. Aid is statistically associated with an increase in corruption in recipient countries. Even in the U.S., each $100 per capita increase in Federal Emergency Management Agency aid to a particular state has resulted in more than a 100% increase in corruption, based on a Justice Department metric.

In one of the most painful sections, the author finds that in countries as diverse as Pakistan, Honduras, Thailand, and Zaire, a significant percentage of foreign aid ended up in the hands of the combatants who were causing the suffering in the first place. Another study shows that the more food aid a recipient country receives, the more likely it is that it will collapse into civil war due to "aid stealing" by warlords.

Coyne ends on a positive note—not about aid, but about increases in economic freedom, which have brought about rapid reductions in poverty in many developing nations. Last summer, rock star and activist Bono broke from the celebrity consensus by explicitly acknowledging that aid is at best a stopgap, and that entrepreneurial capitalism is the only solution to global poverty.

Coyne's work should persuade readers that aid is a very dangerous stopgap at best, while reaffirming that entrepreneurial capitalism should be the approach of choice for those who truly care about helping the world's poor.

MICHAEL STRONG is the lead author of Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems.

Bumpy Ride

Auto history is a lemon

Reviewed by Richard Rescigno

British academic Steven Parissien has attempted a comprehensive history of the global auto industry, with mixed results.

Parissien does a generally good job of tracing the technical advances that shaped the car, such as Cadillac's introduction of an electric starter on its 1912 models and Chrysler's employment of the keyed ignition switch in 1949 to replace the lockless ignition button, often located on the floor.

The Life of the Automobile: The Complete History of the Motorcar

by Steven Parissien Thomas Dunne Books 447 pages, $27.99

The book excels in recounting the politics, internal and external, that have driven and riven the automobile industry since its inception in the late 19th century. An illuminating history of the once-mighty French auto business is here, with all the bitter rivalries, prejudices, and personality clashes among the bosses of Renault, Citroën, and Peugeot. Also chronicled: the rise and collapse of the U.K.'s auto makers, and German car manufacturers' cozy relationships with the Nazis.

But long passages retell stories that have been better told before, including that of Henry Ford's fortitude, genius, anti-Semitism, and paranoia, and of John Z. DeLorean's spectacularly incompetent car-building venture, which led to the immortalization of the wretched DeLorean sports car in the Back to the Future films.

There are factual problems, too. For example, when Alan Mulally became CEO of Ford, he resurrected the Taurus model in the U.S., not the Taunus nameplate in Germany. And Toyota didn't produce the first U.S.-built Japanese car in 1968; Honda did in 1982. There are some notable omissions, as well. In his discussion of the modern electric car, Parissien somehow ignores Tesla. And while the author describes many significant engines, he overlooks the one that revolutionized the U.S. industry by bringing cheap power to the people: the 1955 Chevrolet V8.

Not quite a literary Edsel, this book is far short of the Rolls Royce that the fascinating history of the automobile truly deserves.

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